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Executive Summary

East Carolina University’s present administrative systems reside on varied database platforms, operating system platforms and hardware environments. Some systems are purchased products with formal software vendor support and product updates while others are “home-grown” and maintained by Information Technology and Computing Services (ITCS) staff. While these systems are serving the needs of our students, faculty and staff, they are quickly becoming technologically obsolescent and will become difficult to maintain and enhance to support the planned growth of East Carolina University (ECU). As ECU grows, it will be absolutely critical that the underlying foundation of its administrative functions support the students, faculty and staff on a dynamic and flexible basis. The present administrative systems are largely based upon technology born in the 1970s – those infamous character-based, “green screens” that are neither intuitive nor allow for immediate modifications to meet ECU’s ever-changing functional needs and requirements. Although a data warehouse of financial data built upon a relational database that users can access with sophisticated ad-hoc reporting tools has been developed in 2002, many other (non-financial) functional users are still unable to quickly and easily generate their own online queries and ad-hoc reports because their data is not loaded to a data warehouse.

The existing systems are not integrated with one another. That is, the data for each system resides in different databases on different hardware platforms resulting in the inability of these systems to “talk” to one another in a fluent manner. ITCS and Systems Accounting staff must extract data from these disparate systems, synthesize the data and format the outcome into the desired result. Also, today’s students and employees are computer-savvy and expect a wide-range of student-centered and self-service Internet-based applications to assist them throughout their college career. Many self-service Internet-based applications have been developed by ITCS. However, it is very challenging to generate applications when data is stored in multiple platforms. This separation of data encourages the use of “shadow systems” which causes more problems in providing consistent data reports. The true integration of data does not exist.

The University of North Carolina Board of Governors’ 2002-2007 Long Range Plan contains six strategic directions to pursue the fulfillment of its mission. The sixth strategic direction states:

“Transformation and Change: Use the power of information technology guided by IT strategy and more effective educational administrative and business practices to enable the University to respond to the competitive global environment of the 21^st century”.

The ECU Banner Project Team developed an exhaustive list of requirements for each module for each major functional area (Advancement, Finance, Financial Aid, Human Resources and Student). SCT responded to each of the nearly 3,000 requirements submitted which were then further analyzed by the team members with the end result being a gap analysis. Also included in the analysis of Banner were information from many presentations by SCT; presentations by other vendors partnered with SCT for additional “add-on” products to further enhance the functional capability of Banner; hardware vendor presentations on which Banner will reside; visits to other sites that have implemented Banner and a visit to the corporate headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Pursuing the replacement of ECU’s administrative systems with SCT Banner will enable the university to provide more effective and efficient services for the growing needs of its students, faculty and staff. In order for ECU to provide and sustain the administrative support and services necessary for its planned growth, the time to act is now upon us. The projected Banner implementation timeline is slightly under four years enabling ECU to be operating on its new Banner infrastructure by mid-2007.